


darkness, like a shipwreck

by whitefang (radialarch)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:10:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2291435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/whitefang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[CA:TWS AU.] A year after the Hydra file leak, Steve learns about Project Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	darkness, like a shipwreck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beardsley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beardsley/gifts).



> Written for the prompt of "a sadsadsad catws au".
> 
> Well. I tried.

Steve walks out into his kitchen in just a t-shirt and boxers and nearly jumps at the sight of Natasha sitting at his table.

“Hey.” She raises her head. “You’re out of cereal.”

Steve wordlessly walks back into his bedroom.

 

 

When he gets changed, Natasha’s waiting for him. She’s got her hands folded on top of a file folder, fingers tapping on the sturdy yellow paper. He makes a stack of toast, scraping butter carefully off the knife, and hands her two slices on a plate. The best way to get information out of Natasha, he’s found, is to let her talk first.

Natasha finishes one slice and nibbles on the other before she sighs and spreads her hands flat on the table. “Have you ever heard of Project Winter Soldier?”

“No,” he says honestly. “Is it SHIELD?”

He knows last year’s file dump has blown open a lot of secrets. They’re still finding projects that make Steve shudder, and they’re not always Hydra’s.

Natasha’s mouth twitches. “The Winter Soldier is a legendary Soviet assassin,” she says. “First active in the 1953, he racked up kills all the way into the nineties.”

“You don’t believe in legends.”

“No.” Natasha gives a nod. “But I believe in this.” She lifts the bottom of her shirt up. Steve rises up from his chair to look; framed between two of her fingers is an ugly scar.

“I was covering his mark,” she says, smoothing her shirt out. “Shot him straight through me.”

“Okay.” Steve settles back into his seat. “Why are you telling me this?”

Natasha looks steadily at Steve. “I know one of the guys data mining the Hydra files,” she tells him. “He’s also a bit of a historian. World War II.”

“Natasha.”

“There’s never been a picture of the Winter Soldier.” She opens the file and slides something across the table. “Until now.”

Steve picks it up before it flutters onto his plate. The edges of the picture are worn thin, nearly soft. The photo’s in black and white, but there’s a blue sheen to the paper overlaying everything. And in the middle, an unsmiling face—

“But that’s Bucky,” Steve says.

Natasha lets her breath out through her teeth.

“I don’t understand.” Steve keeps looking at the picture. This Bucky is older than the one of his memories, his cheeks a touch more hollow and hair beginning to grow unkempt; but it is, undeniably, Bucky.

“He didn’t die, Steve,” Natasha says, softly. “When he fell.”

She gets up and walks around the table. Steve barely registers the touch on his shoulder because he’s concentrating on keeping his breathing even.

“I’ll leave you the file,” she says. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

 

 

The papers Natasha brought don’t say much. Steve learns that Project Winter Soldier began October 1943, in Azzano, under the direction of Arnim Zola. That the project was put on hold in December of ‘43, and then restarted a year later.

Steve remembers Bucky falling off the train, the scream. For the briefest moment he’d thought about diving after him, but he’d choked down the impulse because Bucky would’ve wanted him to finish the mission more than he’d want Steve to search for a corpse.

He wonders what Bucky would’ve wanted, when he fell to the ground still alive. If he waited for Steve to come find him.

The Winter Soldier’s first mission was in July 1953. It is recorded as a partial success: the target was eliminated, but it took a team of six to bring the Winter Soldier back in. There is a string of similar stories all throughout the fifties.

Hydra records their first successful mission in February 1967.

Steve stops reading and throws up.

 

 

When he finishes the file, it’s evening. The sky’s gone dim outside his window and there’s a cramp in his neck.

He turns on the lights and drags his laptop over to the table. Googling “project winter soldier” gives him eight million results.

Steve wipes his face with one hand. Then he clicks on the first link — _Variable Electrical Shocks as Method of Control_ — and starts reading.

 _Submersion into Water, Full and Partial._ Click.

 _An Examination of Bone Strength and Chronology of Subsequent Healing._ Click.

 

 

The name Alexander Pierce begins to appear in the files in the eighties and nineties. His name is attached to the proposal, _Verbal Communication with Asset 0-56-WS._

Steve reads:

> The asset shows promising responses to [redacted]. Asset makes eye contact with [redacted] and demonstrates efforts at rudimentary communication.
> 
> Asset’s frontal cortex shows increased activity in response to [redacted]’s voice. Recommend further contact to increase attachment.

Steve goes running. He runs until his lungs are burning and he’s drenched in sweat, until he can’t think past the ache in his legs.

Steve’s never hated the serum quite so much before.

 

 

A report from 1989 reads:

> [redacted] appealed to asset’s sense of patriotism, as per established protocol. Asset reacted uncharacteristically violently. Standard shocks were enough to subdue him.

Steve’s heart jerks in his chest. He leans forward until the words are just a blur of pixels. He thinks he might be smiling.

“You never stopped fighting, did you, Buck.”

 

 

1994.

> Asset refuses to make eye contact with [redacted]. When asked why, repeats, “You’re not him.”
> 
> Asset will not specify who he is referring to.

 

 

The Winter Soldier was last held in a compound in Russia. Steve buys a one-way plane ticket and packs light.

The building is abandoned, looks like it’s been for months now. The air smells stale and the rooms are hastily cleared: desks with chairs tipped over haphazardly, clumps of dust in the corners. Steve opens all the drawers he passes out of habit, but there’s nothing.

In the basement the doors are unlabelled; he kicks each one open. Lab tables with dull, dusty surfaces. A room full of cages, large enough for a person.

Behind the fifth door is a chair. It’s a chair whose schematics Steve has seen before — _Effects of Electroconvulsive Therapy on Memory._

Steve’s fingers clench. He walks into the room. In the back, there’s another door — a sign is peeling off of it: Cryostasis.

The surface of the door is cold to the touch. He twists at the handle; the door swings open heavily.

The room is empty. Steve stares at the walls, uncomprehending, then walks back out.

The chair. He goes back to the chair. There’s a piece of paper taped to the back of it.

 _Project Winter Soldier. Terminated, 1998_.

For a moment, it mean nothing. It takes too long for the words to gain meaning in Steve’s slow, stupid brain.

Because he should have known, all along. Because he should have read the reports and known what it _meant_ , that Bucky was remembering. Remembering him.

Why would Hydra keep a broken weapon?

 

 

Fleetingly, Steve wonders where the grave is. Then he laughs. It sounds ugly and jagged in the empty room.

No one gives a weapon a funeral. Bucky must be a pile of ashes somewhere, in a landscape of industrial waste.

Steve is crying. His breaths come short and noisy out of his mouth. His hands are wrapped around the back of the chair, the chair for _electroconvulsive therapy, adjust the voltage to minimize damage to the asset’s flesh, shocks at an interval of 5-10 seconds—_

The metal whines under Steve’s fingers. Steve stares at it, then wrenches at the chair, hard, until he’s left with a fistful of metal splinters.

Once he starts he can’t stop. He rips out the wiring, snaps them into pieces. He cracks the plastic into small glittering shards, pulls at the frame until it’s bent out of shape, unrecognizable. There’s grease dripping from the back of the chair, leaving stains on his knees and puddling onto the floor.

The first time they put Bucky in this chair, he nearly bit his tongue in two.

Steve’s hands are bloody but that doesn’t matter now. In front of him is only a mess of crushed metal and crackling wires.

A spark goes skittering across the floor, and suddenly, Steve can smell fire. Steve looks at the small flame, and then nods. He stands up, his hands on his thighs.

He finds paper, wood — anything flammable. He searches the entire basement and when that’s not enough, drags furniture down from the first and second floors. In a short time, the flame’s grown tall, licking at the ceiling, and the room is hot enough to send sweat dripping into his eyes.

“It’s done with, Bucky,” Steve says, and drops to his knees. Around him, the fire roars.


End file.
